Belltown P-Patch
A Little Bit of Green Space in the Heart of the City

excerpt from 'Public Art Projects' by Laurie Dunlap

produced by the Seattle Dept. of Neighborhoods, May 1996

Dozens of P-Patch community gardens exist in neighborhoods throughout Seattle. P-Patch advocates are not shy in their claims: the gardens, they say, cultivate friendships, strengthen neighborhoods, increase self-reliance, provide public open space, foster environmental awareness, relieve hunger, improve nutrition, and create recreational and therapeutic opportunities. But those claims seem positively modest compared to what the Friends of a Belltown P-Patch set out to do and what they have, with creativity and years of persistence, managed to accomplish.

The very idea of having a P-Patch garden in the Denny Regrade is audacious. The Regrade is Seattle’s most profitable development corridor and fastest growing neighborhood. The P-Patch site is one-eighth of a city block highly desirable to the businesses surrounding it. It’s not that the surrounding businesses didn’t want it: they did. But the Friends of a Belltown P-Patch wanted it even more and were willing to work long and hard enough to get it.

Acquiring the Land
The Belltown P-Patch started out as an empty lot. The Friends of a Belltown P-Patch started out as five people who lived nearby. Transients used the lot as an illegal camping spot, but these five neighbors imagined a garden. "We were," said project spokesperson Eulah Sheffield, "a bunch of wild-eyed dreamers." Where others saw a weedy lot littered with broken glass, needles, and garbage, they saw a place where flowers and vegetables could grow. They saw a space that could be open and green in the midst of tall buildings and concrete. They saw, moreover, a focal point for the neighborhood, a place where neighbors could gather. It would be a place that neighbors would take care of because it belonged to them. Because of it, neighbors would come to know one another better and the neighborhood would become a safer place.

"We were a bunch of wild-eyed dreamers."

The Friends of a Belltown P-Patch began to garner support and to campaign for the lot’s purchase by the Open Space Opportunity Fund -- and, all the while, kept on dreaming. The Fund had $4.5 million, meaning that only nine or ten purchases would be made out of 112 nominations. "It took a year and a half of lobbying," Sheffield said. "We did a lot of lobbying. We showed up for a lot of bureaucratic meetings. I did a lot of speaking -- before City Council, the Open Space people, others. We’re not lawyers and bankers, we’re just normal people," said Sheffield. "It’s persistence that makes the difference."

"It’s persistence that makes the difference."

"With that many nominations, it was important to do something to stand out," she said. "We used some unusual methods. Wendy had this bee hat that I would wear when I was speaking: it was a lady’s pillbox hat shaped like a bee, black and yellow with bouncing antenna. And we would chalk the sidewalks before meetings so that people going into the building had to walk across sidewalks chalked with ‘Belltown P-Patch.’"

The group’s lobbying generated publicity. The attorney for a developer who was building adjacent to the site remembered reading something about the group. Knowing that the City would require some mitigation in return for the planned development, the developer’s attorney contacted the Friends of a Belltown P-Patch. They, along with Tim Hatley and the neighborhood community council, negotiated with the developer: in the end, the developer contributed $30,000 to the P-Patch. At that point, it was all still speculative since no one knew if the land would be purchased.

But in 1993 the group’s creatively unconventional lobbying paid off: Seattle’s Open Space Program, with additional money from King County’s Open Space Program, bought four-fifths of the lot for $495,000. Sheffield said, "We charmed them into it, someone told me afterwards."

Creating a Garden on the Land
The group was at no loss for how to proceed. For one thing, they had been designing the garden long before the land for it was purchased. "We worked ahead," said Sheffield. "There was a lot of positive thinking."
With the $30,000 in cash and nearly $18,000 in donated time and services, the group successfully applied for $44,566 from the Neighborhood Matching Fund to construct the garden. Behind the group was the support of the local community council, the neighborhood’s crime prevention council, and local businesses and agencies. Also, more than 40 people were on the waiting list to get a plot in the garden-to-be.

The project never lost sight of its larger purpose of becoming a place of ongoing neighborhood interaction. And as a garden-cum-park, it would be maintained by the community itself as well as by the P-Patch program. This broad ownership answered many people’s misgivings that the garden would incur the costs and the problems of an unsupervised park. The Department of Parks and Recreation supported the project precisely because the project was not dependent on maintenance funds which the Department did not have.The group was careful to spend the award money only on those things that could not be donated. One use of the money was to remove the litter-saturated dirt and bring in new soil two feet deep -- although even here the group managed to get some of the soil donated. Still rich in volunteer hours, the group is trying to reserve some of its cash for future maintenance.
The Belltown P-Patch is a remarkable project. It is the most urban of Seattle’s community gardens. To create it required enough community effort to create seven gardens elsewhere. And the final product is, as Sheffield understated it, "more elaborate than most." For one thing, the Belltown P-Patch is full of artwork.

Art in the Garden
The garden’s art comes in different forms. Because the land was on a hillside, a high retaining wall was built and a guard rail across the top of it was needed to satisfy safety requirements. The concrete retaining wall is curved to add beauty to utility; it contains several mosaics, with room for others. The metal railing on the garden’s north and west sides depicts modernistic looking vegetables growing. Within a high arched entry way are a pair of steel gates, created by a different artist, using traditional blacksmithing techniques. The rock walls that form the garden’s raised beds serve the additional function of making it clear where people can walk -- an important function in a P-Patch that is as much a park as a garden. Local artist Buster Simpson has promised to create a sculpture for the P-Patch whenever the P-Patch is ready for it, which will be as soon as gardeners have prepared an adequate site.

Among the other committees, an Art Review Committee was set up to review and approve art for the garden and, later, an Art Committee was set up to coordinate its installation. In initially planning the garden, "we knew we wanted to use Belltown artists," said Sheffield. Because Belltown is a pretty small neighborhood, artists (and everyone else in the community) tend to know one another and one another’s work. Louie Raffloer, a Belltown blacksmith whose shop is in the neighborhood, immediately came to mind to create the garden gates. In the neighborhood, everyone was familiar with a gate that he had created, metal with garden tools welded onto it. The job did have to go out to bid, but Raffloer agreed to create the gate for "the cost of materials and what turned out to be about a dollar an hour." The steel gate took approximately 200 hours to create. Unlike the earlier gate, the P-Patch garden gate incorporates garden tools made entirely by hand by the artist. It is easily worth ten times what the group paid for it. A labor of love, it is constructed with a craftsmanship that only another blacksmith could begin to appreciate, but with a beauty and whimsy that no one could fail to enjoy.
Unlike the gate, the railing was needed immediately and went out to bid with an urgent deadline. The gardeners found that for the same price as they could have a plain and basic guard railing, they could contract with neighbors Kevin Spitzer and Jonathan Barnett to build a work of art -- given that the artists were willing to donate twice as much time as they were paid for.

Wilbur Hathaway headed up the garden mosaic projects while Shanty Slader did research and coordinated donations. Anyone in the group who was interested got together and sketched out designs. Then they researched how to make mosaics: they went to the library but more importantly, said Hathaway, "for months we told everyone about it -- and people gave us leads, told us stories, gave us tips." Hearing of other mosaics around Seattle, they took field trips to see what others had done. "We plagiarized the good ideas we saw and put our own spin on it." To get materials, the group put an ad in the Regrade Dispatch asking for donated tile and marble, and the materials poured in.
"There’s a lot to know," said Hathaway: about grouts, adhesive, the effect of weather conditions, interior vs. exterior materials, colors, prices. A professional mosaicist came and showed them how to install the mosaics. The members of the group who initially learned have taught others who in turn will teach still others.

A note to community groups working with timelines and with artists: Remember that more goes into a process than a non-practitioner understands. Be clear with project deadlines and other expectations. Verify that a deadline is realistic before you set it.

The Next Phase
Belltown’s P-Patch is an ongoing and expanding project. More mosaics will be installed as people have time. The group is currently constructing a tool shed. Like everything else in the Belltown P-Patch, it will combine utility with beauty and whimsy, and be topped by a bell once used at an old school.
In the course of their organizing, project participants found out that one of the streets bordering the garden (Vine St., appropriately enough) is zoned as a "Green Street (Type 1)" -- meaning, it can be closed to cars and landscaped. A design class at the University of Washington has taken it on as a design competition project. That design, in turn, will give more weight to the prospective project. "That’s what we did all along," said Sheffield, "have everything in place. That way, the City or other backers can look and see that everything is in place and ready to go -- the design is completed, the maintenance is arranged for. Projects like that are more attractive to funders."

Celebration
When the P-Patch opened, the group held a ground-breaking ceremony and commemorative program to celebrate and to thank everyone who helped make it happen. One group member who owns a costume shop made its stock available to people for the parade that wound through the neighborhood. There was music from two bands, dancers, and a blessing ceremony. Gardeners led guided tours of the garden. A neighboring social service agency opened one of its kitchens and provided several cook’s helpers; local restaurants donated supplies: with that kind of community support, the Belltown P-Patch was able to serve enough food to feed all 400 of the people who attended the celebration.

Advice
Sheffield’s foremost advice is: "Have faith and just keep going."

"Have faith and just keep going."

Second: "Be as organized as possible." The group may have been full of wild-eyed dreamers but they also made sure that they were ready whenever any opportunity came along -- and, as well, they went far toward creating those opportunities. They lobbied long and hard and effectively to get the land purchased. They used a variety of tactics, employing humor and art. It was the publicity they generated that brought them to the attention of a developer who was seeking avenues of mitigation. What might have been a relationship marked by mistrust and adversarial cross-purposes turned out to be one of mutual benefit and community building.
"Don’t burn people out," said Sheffield. Especially in a long ongoing project like this one, people burn out and leave (and, given enough time, may return). But ideally, watch for burn-out and organize to avoid it.
And finally: "Be devoted." Projects are usually more work than anyone imagined. If people are going to stay involved with it, the project has got to be important to them. "For everyone involved with the Belltown P-Patch, it was really important to have that little bit of green space in the neighborhood -- there’s so little green in the Regrade. People gave huge amounts of their time and energy."

"For everyone involved ... it was really important to have that little bit of green space in the neighborhood...."

That devotion paid off -- paid off for the gardeners, for the surrounding neighborhood, and for Seattle as a whole, both now and in the future. "As the city grows, the idea of community-maintained parks will grow more important," said Sheffield. "And this P-Patch will grow more important as the area grows up around it."

Resources
Belltown P-Patch

Myke Woodwell, project manager
2516 Elliott Ave.
Seattle WA 98121
(206) 441-7702

Glenn MacGilvra, project organizer
(206) 725-8554

P-Patch Program
Seattle Department of Housing and Human Services
618 2nd Ave.
Seattle WA 98104
(206) 684-0264

The P-Patch community gardening program manager, Rich MacDonald, can give you information and encouragement. The program updates its information and materials resource list each year and has a quarterly newsletter. Call for information or to get an application to garden your own P-Patch.

© 2002 by mykejw @ speakeasy.org